Sometimes You Have to Do It Yourself

Nordic Logistics and Warehousing, the Cold Chain Specialist, is one of the country’s largest cold storage warehouse companies. While working with them on a design build project, we encountered a problem that plagues the entire cold storage industry –pallet spacers that don’t really work for freezing. But, instead of simply accepting this as standard practice, Tippmann Innovation did things differently – we took it upon ourselves to develop something better.

The Project

Nordic Logistics and Warehousing has several facilities throughout the southeast United States. When the company needed a new facility in Georgia, they called Tippmann Innovation. But, the project hinged on a single factor – fast freezing times. Nordic needed to meet high volume turn over rates for the project to move forward. Tippmann Innovation delivered with our revolutionary QuickFreeze system.
Thanks to QuickFreeze we were able to give Nordic a performance guarantee, which we met. Then, after the system was in place and working as it should, a new problem emerged – freeze times slowed and food product wasn’t freezing evenly. The problem wasn’t with QuickFreeze, but with the industry standard egg crate style spacers used to stack product on pallets. The spacers would crush together and create a bottleneck effect, slowing freezing times. It was maddening that such a seemingly simple product had the power to derail a major project. That’s when the minds of Tippmann Innovation went to work to find a better way.

Challenges and Opportunities

There were two main problems with existing spacers. Either they were too flimsy and collapsed or, if they were substantial, they added additional height, which didn’t work in the existing freezer footprint. So that became the challenge: find a product that would hold up without compromising the amount of space available for product. We turned it into an opportunity by rejecting the business as usual model, and developing our own system. That’s the Tippmann Innovation way.

The Solution

With the Nordic project as a motivator, the Tippmann Innovation team developed something that has the potential to change the entire industry – the T2 Spacer System™. The ground-breaking design maximizes air velocity across and within the pallet to provide consistent airflow, which eliminates partial freezing and reduces freeze times – by as much as 40%. It also solves the seemingly simple problem of crushing, which is a bigger problem than many in the industry even realize because it causes uneven and partial freezing.
T2 does all of this without adding weight or height. While T2 was made to work in conjunction with QuickFreeze, it works equally well with blast freezers, too. The secret lies in the ingenious design featuring an airflow pattern that increases air velocity across and within the pallet.

The Final Verdict

Our original client, Nordic, was thrilled with the results. The quick turn around times we promised are consistently met, so they are able to provide a high volume of high-quality products to their customers. Everyone at Tippmann is excited too because we were able to create an innovative solution that doesn’t only benefit our client, but the industry as a whole. Discover more about the T2 Spacing System here and see what faster, more consistent freezing can do for your product.